Introduction

We’re in the process of implemention Resource Manager (RM) on our Oracle 11gR1 Data Warehouse. We’ve currently got one DW application live, but have several more imminent. We identified RM as a suitable way of - as the name would suggest - managing the resources on the server.

In the first instance we’re looking at simply protecting CPU for, and from, future applications. At some point it would be interesting to use some of the more granular and precise functions to demote long-running queries, have nighttime/daytime plans, etc. I’d also like to explore the management of IO but for us the pain is in bandwidth that a query consumes, and it looks like RM can only work with total session MB, or IOPS. Reading about Exadata it sounds like the Exadata I/O Resource Management might do this ([…]It allows intra and inter-database I/O bandwidth to be defined and managed[..]). But for that I’ll have to write to Santa and promise to be a good boy this year.

This problem, which in essence is bad behaviour from Informatica bringing down Oracle, is a good illustration of unintended consequences of an apparently innocuous security setting. Per our company’s security standards, database passwords expire every 90 days. When this happens users are prompted to change their password before they can continue logging into Oracle. This applies to application user IDs too. It appears that Informatica 8.6.1 HF6 (part of OBIA 7.9.6.1) doesn’t handle an expired password well, spawning multiple connections to the database, eventually bringing Oracle down through memory SWAP space exhaustion.

A very short blog post to break the drought, but I didn’t hit any google results for this error so thought it might be useful to record it.

In BI Publisher 10.1.3.4, trying to install the Scheduler (Quartz) schema, I got this error:

[sourcecode]Schema installation failed while creating tables. Schema may already exist. Please remove the existing schema or choose another database and try again.[/sourcecode]

To me, the error text is a bit unhelpful. Whilst the first statement is correct - “Schema installation failed while creating tables”, it doesn’t tell you the error it encountered, and then it goes on to suggest only one reason for the failure.

@alexgorbachev tweeted me recently after picking up my presentation on Performance Testing and OBIEE.

His question got me thinking, and as ever the answer “It Depends” is appropriate here :-)

Why is the measurement being done?

Without knowing the context of the work Alex is doing, how to measure depends on whether the measurement needs to be of: -

1. The actual response times that the users are getting, or
2. The response times that the system is currently capable of delivering

This may sound like splitting hairs or beard-scratching irrelevance, but it’s not. If the aim of the exercise is to be able to make a statement along the lines of:

Here are a couple of little unix scripts that I wrote whilst developing my performance testing OBIEE method.

They’re nothing particularly special, but may save you the couple of minutes it’d take to write them :)

Note that some of this data is available from Usage Tracking and where it is I’d recommend getting it from there, databases generally being easier to reliably and repeatably query than a transient log file.

OBIEE 11g is going to be officially launched on 7th July (this year!) in London: Launch Event: Introducing Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g

h/t to Twitter and blogs (including an Oracle-branded one) this morning. Good news travels fast! :-)

Looks like John Minkjan won the bet, did he know something we didn’t? ;-) (although is “Launch” the same as “GA”?)

Here’s my presentation “Performance Testing and OBIEE” that I gave at the RittmanMead BI Forum 2010: Performance Testing and OBIEE.pptx

It’s a Powerpoint 2007 file (pptx) for which you may need the Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer 2007. I’ve included copious notes on each slide which hopefully cover the gist of what I talked about when I was delivering it. There are also a handful of funky animations which is why I’ve left it in pptx and not exported to PDF or other format (sorry Open Office users).

I delivered my first presentation today, at the RittmanMead BI Forum.I was really nervous in the hours and minutes leading up to it, but once I got up there and started talking I actually quite enjoyed it. If you were in the audience, I’d love some feedback in the comments section below, particularly any “constructive criticism”. I obviously didn’t make too much of a mess of it, as I was awarded “best speaker” of the event, which was a great honour. Hopefully I’ll get the opportunity to present again soon, perhaps at an UKOUG event.

I’ve just returned from the RittmanMead 2010 BI Forum which this year was at the Seattle Hotel in Brighton Marina.

The event was limited to 50 attendees, and I think this was a good number. The event was explicitly pitched at a very technical expert level, and the audience very much represented this. Whereas at a larger conference you may find the odd manager wandering around pretending to be technical ;-) this event was most definitely not pitched at such types.

Troubleshooting EBS-BI integrated authentication can be a tiresome activity, so here’s a shortcut that might help. If you suspect the problem lies with EBS then you can leave OBIEE out of the equation.

1. Login to EBS
   

2. Use FireBug or Fiddler2 to inspect web traffic as follows:

3. Click the BI link from EBS

4. Should be first a request to EBS server, which returns 302 and redirects to http://<bi server>:<port>/analytics/saw.dll?Dashboard&acf=101507310

5. Record the value of acf (eg 101507310)
   

What’s going on here? The username/password is definitely valid, proved by the sqlplus connection.

Configuring DAC in OBIA 7.9.5.1:

[sourcecode] What can I do for you?

1 - Enter repository connection information 2 - Test repository connection 3 - Enter email account information 4 - Send test email 5 - Save changes 6 - Exit

Please make your selection: 1

These are your connection type choices:

1 - MSSQL 2 - DB2 3 - Oracle (OCI8) 4 - Oracle (Thin) 5 - Keep current ( Oracle (Thin) )

This is a note-to-self really. When playing around with Oracle and something’s not working - RTFAL: Read The Flippin Alert Log!

After resizing a VM I was getting this problem: [sourcecode] [oracle@RNMVM01 ~]$ sqlplus / as sysdba

SQL*Plus: Release 11.2.0.1.0 Production on Sat Apr 24 17:44:44 2010

Copyright (c) 1982, 2009, Oracle. All rights reserved.

Connected to an idle instance.

SQL> startup nomount ORA-00845: MEMORY_TARGET not supported on this system SQL> [/sourcecode]

A faithful FireFox user for many users, I’ve been having a rather delightful rekindling of my old love for Opera recently. Back in the days, when I was a beardless bairn, I even paid for Opera I liked it so much. Then Firefox came along and Opera got dropped by the wayside like a teenage crush.

Well Opera 10.5 was released recently and I’m liking it. I miss my Firefox extensions too much to switch entirely, but damn, Opera is FAST!!

I’m doing my first ever conference presentation next month at the 2010 Rittman Mead BI Forum.

My presentation is called Performance Testing OBIEE, which is something I’ve spent a lot of time working on over the last few months. I think the challenge is going to be distilling it all into a session that’s not going to overwhelm everyone or bore them to death! Well, actually, the challenge is going to be the presenting. I can talk geek one-on-one, but talking to a whole bunch of people, not wittering but staying focussed, holding their attention….uh oh.

Spotted this when trawling through My Oracle Support. It’s pretty common knowledge anyway amongst people already familiar with hacking around with OBIEE, but worth recording for people coming along to it new.

Doc ID 1068266.1 states:

UDML is not supported in OBI 10g.

in 11g, XUDML (the Oracle BI Server XML API) will be fully supported and documented.

I’ve been playing around with SQL Tuning Sets, and was trying to clear up my mess.

To list all the tuning sets: [sourcecode language=“sql”] SET WRAP OFF SET LINE 140 COL NAME FOR A15 COL DESCRIPTION FOR A50 WRAPPED

select name,created,last_modified,statement_count,description from DBA_SQLSET [/sourcecode]

[sourcecode] NAME CREATED LAST_MODI STATEMENT_COUNT DESCRIPTION ————— ——— ——— ————— —————————————————————————————- sts_test_02 09-MAR-10 09-MAR-10 1 Test run 1 sts_test_01 12-FEB-10 12-FEB-10 1 an old STS test test test [/sourcecode]

JMX

OBIEE’s Systems Management functionality exposes performance counters and the application’s configuration options through Java MBeans and optionally a protocol called JMX.

It’s extremely useful, and is documented pretty widely :

• JConsole / JMX
• JConsole / JMX – followup
• Oracle BI Management / Systems Management MBeans
• PerfMon
• OBIEE MBeans and OC4J
• OBIEE performance monitoring and alerting with jManage

In this article I’m going to discuss the use of JMX to access these counters remotely, and a possible security issue that’s present in the BI Management Pack manual. The BI Management Pack is an add-on to Oracle’s Enterprise Manager / Grid Control for managing OBIEE, see Mark Rittman’s excellent guide on Oracle’s website.

We hit a very interesting problem in our Production environment recently. We’d made no changes for a long time to the configuration, but all of a sudden users were on the phone complaining. They could login to BI from EBS but after logging in the next link they clicked took them to the OBIEE “You are not logged in” screen.

Our users login to EBS R12 and then using EBS authentication log in to OBIEE (10.1.3.4). Our OBIEE is deployed on OAS, load balanced across two servers by an F5 BIG-IP hardware load balancer.

A new document has been published by Oracle, discussing ways of improving performance for OBIA 7.9.6 and 7.9.6.1. Its primary focus is around improving ETL performance. There’s some very interesting content including hardware sizing recommendations, and I’d strongly recommend anyone working with OBIA reads it.

It’s called “Oracle Business Intelligence Applications Version 7.9.6 Performance Recommendations” and is available on My Oracle Support through Doc ID 870314.1

After it was ripped down last week, Chris Warticki’s blog is back online, albeit with the last posting redirecting visitors to a new location on Oracle Communities.

Maybe I’m getting too old for this s##t, but I’m yet to really get a handle on how Oracle want to interact with real people on the ground. Oracle Communities is a fairly new site that I’ve not explored so much because of no OBIEE area. My Oracle Support has feedback and comment sections, but in general usability stinks. A support blog is torn down and then reappears. Oracle Forums are popular as ever but the software blows and some forums (eg OBIEE) are withering under a very high noise to quality-content ratio. Oh, and Oracle Mix (“Bringing Oracle Customers, Employees, and Developers together”) too, which looked quite neat but I have no idea how that’s supposed to fit it the picture.